Mythical Infrastructuring
The Work of Stories in the Making of the Chacao Bridge, Southern Chile
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Abstract
The very nature of large-scale infrastructure projects—long design and construction periods, high investment, and impact on social and natural spaces—makes them prone to socioecological and technical conflicts. These conflicts materialize in stories that become keystones in the making of infrastructure. In this article, we analyze the infrastructuring power of stories by drawing on the case of the Chacao Bridge on Chiloé Island in southern Chile, a controversial infrastructure project that has been in the making over the last six decades. We argue that the “absence” of the bridge creates a space for the production of stories on the island's inherited past and imagined future that keeps recurring and growing in the form of myths. Thus, we propose the concept of “mythical infrastructuring” to capture this process. We then conclude by arguing that the Chacao Bridge project develops its infrastructuring presence over landscape and culture in contradictory ways that cannot be solved technically or symbolically.
Contributor Notes
Rodrigo Cordero is a Full Professor of Sociology at Universidad Diego Portales, Chile. His work is located at the intersection of critical theory, political sociology, and conceptual history. His most recent research explores normative controversies in socioecological crises and the relations between law, democracy, and neoliberalism. He is author of Crisis and Critique: On the Fragile Foundations of Social Life (Routledge, 2017) and La fuerza de los conceptos: Ensayos en teoría crítica e imaginación política [The force of concepts: Essays in critical theory and political imagination] (Metales Pesados, 2021). Email: rodrigo.cordero@udp.cl
Aldo Mascareño is a Senior Researcher at Centro de Estudios Públicos and Professor of Sociology at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Chile. He is the author of Diferenciación y contingencia en América Latina [Differentiation and contingency in Latin America] (Ediciones Alberto Hurtado, 2010), Die Moderne Lateinamerikas [The modern Latin Americas] (Transcript, 2012), Legitimization in World Society (ed. with Kathya Araujo, Routledge, 2016) and more than 90 articles and book chapters in the areas of sociological theory, sociology of law, and complexity theories. Email: amascareno@cepchile.cl
Ignacia Rodríguez is a Graduate in Economics from the University of Chile, currently pursuing a master's degree in data science from the Adolfo Ibáñez University. Since 2019, she has worked as technical staff for Fondecyt project number 1190265: “Governing Critical Transitions in Socio-Ecological Systems: The case of Chiloe, Chilé.” In 2021, she worked on the C22 Project funded by the Centro de Estudios Públicos (CEP). From September 2022 to March 2023, she worked as a data specialist for the Chilean Treasury Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs. Email: ignacia.rodriguez@gmail.com
Francisco Salinas is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Social Sciences (ICSO), Universidad Diego Portales, Chile. Since 2023, he has been in charge of ANID project number 3230083: “Civil Engineering in Chile: A Sociological Research on the Education, Profession and Performativity of an Expertise in Times of Climate Crisis,” His research areas include the sociology of professions and experts (especially philosophy and engineering), ethnographic methods for policy research, and social theory (especially pragmatism and actor-network theory). Email: francisco.salinas@mail.udp.cl